(We’re really getting into the weeds about which color to paint the bike-shed here[1], but nonetheless....)
Thinking aloud… One issue is that this is a pretty unexpected reason, and I currently would not be able to raise this hypothesis as why I was being downvoted. Normally it means the substance of the comment was bad or somehow norm-violating, I have little-to-no sense that ppl downvote for hijacking threads on LW.
On the other hand I think I was slightly hijacking the thread. Well, that’s not right. I felt the comment section was very overwhelming with a sense of “You are wrong and you are doing empathy wrong”, and my comment agreeing with the post got little-to-no traction in-spite of being the very first comment on the post, so I came to find someone in-particular to argue with. I think it was probably good for the discourse for me to post a counterargument under the top comment. I thought the top comment was a pretty good encapsulation of the view I disagreed with (I did look at the other comments and felt this was most appropriate to disagree with). I could’ve written a shortform or top-level post, but I guess I don’t think that responding to a prominent comment is a bad place for me to provide counterarguments. In my model many of the other comments are primarily provide social force rather than unique and additional points/arguments (e.g. multiple instances of “you’re just switching yourself into their decisions, not their psychology” highly upvoted, a claim I disagree with), so I wasn’t especially pushing out much substantive content, and again, providing a counterargument is not off-topic, so I think this isn’t relevantly a hijacking.
Perhaps we should have a feature for comments for when your comment is a nitpick / off-topic / aside, where you can choose to make your comment be collapsed-by-default and at the bottom of the set of immediate replies.
Also, this thread could be a good option for the “move thread to open thread” feature, with a two-way link.
I think your comment was a little bit “cheating” against LW’s systems, and thus deserving of a little downvote. I don’t know if a norm exists against this kind of cheating, but I think it should.
IIRC, I kinda perceived that you were trying to pushback against a general vibe spread throughout the comment section. Your comment is basically not engaging with cata’s comment at all. You reference the video, which cata doesn’t, and you reference “believing everyone is doing the best they can”, which is not something cata says. You were pushing against the general zeitgeist, and you did it in a way that uses a quirk of the commenting system to give it prominence.
I think you should have written a top-level comment pushing back against the other comments, perhaps linking to them. And then the karma system could have buoyed it to the top, or not.
(We’re really getting into the weeds about which color to paint the bike-shed here[1], but nonetheless....)
Thinking aloud… One issue is that this is a pretty unexpected reason, and I currently would not be able to raise this hypothesis as why I was being downvoted. Normally it means the substance of the comment was bad or somehow norm-violating, I have little-to-no sense that ppl downvote for hijacking threads on LW.
On the other hand I think I was slightly hijacking the thread. Well, that’s not right. I felt the comment section was very overwhelming with a sense of “You are wrong and you are doing empathy wrong”, and my comment agreeing with the post got little-to-no traction in-spite of being the very first comment on the post, so I came to find someone in-particular to argue with. I think it was probably good for the discourse for me to post a counterargument under the top comment. I thought the top comment was a pretty good encapsulation of the view I disagreed with (I did look at the other comments and felt this was most appropriate to disagree with). I could’ve written a shortform or top-level post, but I guess I don’t think that responding to a prominent comment is a bad place for me to provide counterarguments. In my model many of the other comments are primarily provide social force rather than unique and additional points/arguments (e.g. multiple instances of “you’re just switching yourself into their decisions, not their psychology” highly upvoted, a claim I disagree with), so I wasn’t especially pushing out much substantive content, and again, providing a counterargument is not off-topic, so I think this isn’t relevantly a hijacking.
Perhaps we should have a feature for comments for when your comment is a nitpick / off-topic / aside, where you can choose to make your comment be collapsed-by-default and at the bottom of the set of immediate replies.
Also, this thread could be a good option for the “move thread to open thread” feature, with a two-way link.
I think your comment was a little bit “cheating” against LW’s systems, and thus deserving of a little downvote. I don’t know if a norm exists against this kind of cheating, but I think it should.
IIRC, I kinda perceived that you were trying to pushback against a general vibe spread throughout the comment section. Your comment is basically not engaging with cata’s comment at all. You reference the video, which cata doesn’t, and you reference “believing everyone is doing the best they can”, which is not something cata says. You were pushing against the general zeitgeist, and you did it in a way that uses a quirk of the commenting system to give it prominence.
I think you should have written a top-level comment pushing back against the other comments, perhaps linking to them. And then the karma system could have buoyed it to the top, or not.
Some fair points; I don’t quite agree, but I think a marginal downvote is not worth a lot of discussion, I’ll bow out here.